Interpretations of the Human Self in Never Let Me Go
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the question of what makes us human takes chief concern. Taking place in a historically alternate late 1990’s England, Ishiguro depicts a scenario in which, thanks to scientific breakthroughs in biology and human genetics, once fatal ailments such as “cancer, motor neuron disease,” and “heart disease” have become largely curable (263). The institutionalization of this medical miracle is achieved due to the creation of class of clones, reared in exclusion from “normal” British society, whose soul purpose is the “Donation” of their vital organs and bodily material to the service of institutionalized health until, upon the fourth donation, they “Complete”—another word for die. This coming of age story is dispatched from the perspective of Kathy H., a 31-year-old “Carer” wearily awaiting her first “Donation,” who recounts the lives of her and her cohort, from their upbringing as “Students” at the pastoral English boarding school of Hailsham, to the present. Through the veil of dystopic science fiction, Ishiguro’s novel explores the bio-political implications and power relations promoted by a liberal humanist ideology and concept of subjectivity that rejects the non-human. In his exploration, Ishiguro elicits a portrait of self-hood in which boundaries are confused, permeable, and interdependent.
The novel reveals the true nature of the “Students’” conditions slowly. Inspired by the tradition of gothic fiction and romantic pastoral English novels, Ishiguro’s Kathy H. is an unreliable narrator with a tendency to digress. Her narration lacks the urgency of someone whose life has been systematically cut short. Rather, she addresses the reader with a note of world-weariness, meandering laxity and submission. In this submissive tone we can begin to identify the effects power and discipline that have been placed upon the students. From an early age the clones are imbued by their “Guardians”—those at Hailsham in charge of overseeing their development into adulthood—with a sense of their difference from those on the outside, the non-cloned “normals,” as the students call them, stressing that their bodies are “special.” Hailsham, as an institution of education and a medical apparatus of the state, is in charge of regulating and managing the clones. However, this management goes beyond simply insuring their health and wellbeing. Hailsham serves as mechanism for producing what Michel Foucault identifies as “docile bodies.” In Discipline and Punish, he explains: “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault 136). Hailsham’s principle goal is to produce bodies that do not question and can be easily manipulated, managed, and exploited. The most meaningful tactic that Hailsham employs to achieve this is by withholding information from students, or by timing the dissemination information “very carefully and deliberately” so that the students are, “always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information” (Ishiguro 82). By withholding information, Hailsham is able to control the ideas that shape students’ lives. At one point a guardian, Miss Lucy, breaks coda and confront the students’ in plain speak about the methods at Hailsham and reveals to them their conscripted realities.
The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I’m not. If you’re going to have decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly…. Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. (81)
The reaction that Miss Lucy receives from the students is not one of outrage or bewilderment. Instead, Miss Lucy’s attempt to speak truth is met with indifference, the students respond as if in someway they’d known all along, “told and not told.” In the production of docility the students had already been conditioned to accept their fates.
For Foucault, the liberal subject, the autonomous individual is, in fact, a paradoxical beast. It is this tenuous duality of the self, existing at once as both transcendent subject and empirical object of representation that serves as an important basis for Foucault’s theories of bio-power and discipline. In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the linguistic creation of man as a relatively new phenomenon in history, one that reflects an “epistemic” shift in the theory of knowledge.
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. (Foucault 421-422)
As a theory of the self, Foucault sees “man” as already fundamentally fragmented between transcendent subject and knowable object. It is in the quest to constantly reify and reinforce individuality and subjectivity that man tends to seek power over others. The world Ishiguro depicts in Never Let Me Go is one in which the exploitative power relations identified by Foucault are taken to an extreme.
“Discipline,” as Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish, “may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology. (Foucault 192). In Foucauldian terms, Hailsham acts as a “panoptic” structure. It’s occupants are individualized, managed, regimented, and placed under constant surveillance. More than anything, the students of Hailsham are afraid of shaking the stability of their social structure, being singled out by their peers or guardians, creating awkward moments, “embarrassing” or “humiliating” themselves. Their fear of punishment, in the form of humiliation or embarrassment, debilitates them from seriously questioning their lot in life and their mortal purpose to society. They internalize the strictures of control that Hailsham places upon them and become participants in its production of power. As Foucault states in Discipline, “he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (202). In other words, in the panoptic system that Foucault describes, the prisoners and the prison guards become interchangeable, both imbricated within the system of disciplinary power. We can see this relation at work as Kathy remembers an instance in which a student named Marge questions a guardian on whether she had ever smoked a cigarette. The guardian admonishes them, “…for you, all of you, it’s much, much worse to smoke than it ever was for me.” She continues, “You’ve been told about it. You’re students. You’re… special. So keeping yourselves well, keeping yourselves very healthy inside, that’s much more important for each of you than it is for me” (Ishiguro 68-69). Kathy H. recalls with curiosity why no one was ever bothered by these vague explanations.
“So why had we stayed silent that day? I suppose it was because even at that age—we were nine or ten—we knew just enough to make us wary of that whole territory. It’s hard now to remember just how much we knew by then. We certainly knew—though not in any deep sense—that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside; we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line there were donations waiting for us. But we didn’t really know what that meant. If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us. We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that. I think that’s why we never asked that one further question, and why we punished Marge K. so cruelly for bringing it all up that day after the rounders match.” (69)
Here we see that Kathy and her peers have not only internalized the discipline of Hailsham by both deciding not to pursue further questioning and in their “punishment” of Marge K., socially reproaching her for creating an “awkward” situation guardian. It is this internalized discipline that not only keeps Kathy and her cohort from really questioning their circumstances, but also keeps them from acting out, plotting an escape, or driving off a bridge. As docile bodies within a system of discipline, the thought of action never occurs. It also implicates Kathy in the maintenance of the system that intends to exploit her. By regulating the behavior of her peers, “punishing” them for disturbing the complacency of the institution, Kathy has unwittingly become a part of the machinery of social discipline at the school.
At Hailsham, the focus discipline and power is to regulate students’ in totality, mind and body. By instating control over the minute details of how the students maintain, consider, and control their bodies at an individual level, Hailsham participates in the dissemination of bio-power. While discipline is an important element of biopower, Foucault observes in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, that confession plays a role of importance as well. “The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power” (Foucault 59). Through confession, institutions—Foucault uses the church as an example—are able to enforce a doctrine of truth. Confession invites bodies to hold themselves up to the scrutiny of institutional powers and thus serves an important role in discerning a persons transgressions, deviancy, or value.
At Hailsham, “confession” emerges in the very curriculum. Rather than a traditional English education that would include math, science, geography and history, Hailsham students are educated almost exclusively in arts and poetics. Creative output is judged for its quality and rewarded by the guardians, the best of which is collected and shown in “galleries” outside of the school. Creative prowess also plays into the social identity, as Kathy states, “a lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at ‘creating’” (Ishiguro 16). But the real impetus for all this creativity is revealed to be much more confessional than we are initially lead to believe. Operating under the humanist assumption that art is a reflection of one’s humanity; the students’ work is used not merely to judge talent or precision, but as a metric to evaluate their souls—or to prove that they have any human qualities at all. Late in the narrative Kathy and her boyfriend Tommy confront the former headmistress of Hailsham to seek a possible deferment for their donation, theorizing that perhaps the art that had been taken by the guardians during childhood may have in some way qualified the value of their love.
Why did we take your artwork? Why did we do that? You said an interesting thing earlier, Tommy. When you were discussing this with Marie-Claude. You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all. (260)
The role of art reveals a key element of the essential humanist assumption of which Ishiguro is taking aim. Art here acts, not as a liberating or redemptive force, but as a component of exploitation. Again, as Miss Emily, explains:
That was why we collected your art. We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies, at the height of our influence, we were organising large events all around the country. There’d be cabinet ministers, bishops, all sorts of famous people coming to attend. There were speeches, large funds pledged. ‘There, look!’ we could say. ‘Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?’ Oh yes, there was a lot of support for our movement back then, the tide was with us. (261-262)
While used as an instrument to stir public sympathy for the wellbeing of the students, art functions, ultimately, as a means to continue the project of exploitation, albeit in a more publicly conscionable way. Going back to Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the power of confession rests ultimately in its ability not only to wrest truth from the confessor, but also its ability to disguise itself, like art in the case of our clones, as a liberating or humanizing activity.
The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, "demands" only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. (60)
For the Hailsham students who have been raised with the notion that they are “different” from normal people, we initially believe that the incentives of their artistic confessions, their revelations of the soul, are to prove their value and reveal their “humanity” to each other and the outside world. But the real power in this relationship lies less with the Othering of students, and more within the myth of “humanity” itself and the corresponding faith placed in the ability of the arts confirm it. The transcendent urge behind the impulse to create and show art by the clones reflects a yearning to prove that a standard for the human soul exists at all, for clones and non-clones alike. By creating an environment in which art is understood to prove the soul, Hailsham creates a culture in which the extraction of body parts is already prefigured by the extraction of art, insinuating that art from the clones, much like the organs from the clones, is basically interchangeable and indistinguishable with that of the “natural” human.
The role of art in Never Let Me Go is further complicated by how we may interpret the clones, existing as representations or reproductions of the human form, “works of art” themselves. Looking to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” it is entirely possible to produce a reading of Never Let Me Go which holds the mechanically reproduced students of Hailsham next to the mechanically reproduced art analyzed by Benjamin. As Benjamin states,“…for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an even greater degree the work of art produced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (39). As “mechanical reproductions,” the clones are “emancipated” from the context of history and nativity that validate “authentic” human beings, or at least those depicted in Never Let Me Go. The clones themselves are of course, “designed for reproducibility” as they are derived from an ostensibly endless supply of DNA.
Raised without the traditional elements of family history, social context, or political agency that are characteristic of “normal” humans, the clones are stand-ins for art that has been severed from what Benjamin calls “aura.”
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced…Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of cultural heritage. (Benjamin 221)
For Benjamin, a spectator viewing a work of art, take for example a statue of Christ, will experience the full “aura” of the work. The social, political, and ritualistic history of the physical art object would become apparent in the material presence of the piece. Meanwhile, a photograph of the exact statue removes it from its historical place and transforms its materiality.
The “aura” is lost. In its place is the potential for a plurality of reproductions from countless angles and vantage points. With mechanical reproduction, a photographer can focus on certain parts of a piece while leaving others out completely. While this mechanical perspective reveals something new about the piece, allowing the photographer the ability to zoom in or enlarge the image, it also detaches it from its origin and traditional meaning. Likewise, the mechanical reproduction of the clones stresses certain features, ability to successfully grow and donate healthy organs, while other traditionally important aspects of humanity, like the ability to sexually reproduce, are left out completely. Benjamin sees the rise of mechanical reproduction as a sign of a radical cultural shift, a “liquidation of the traditional value of cultural heritage.” In Never Let Me Go, the character of Madame mirrors this Benjaminian stance. Late in the novel, Kathy confronts Madame about a moment they shared in her childhood:
“There was a time you saw me once, one afternoon, in the dormitories. There was no one else around, and I was playing this tape, this music. I was sort of dancing with my eyes closed and you saw me. […] Well, you were… upset that day. You were watching me, and when I realised, and I opened my eyes, you were watching me and I think you were crying. In fact, I know you were. You were watching me and crying. Why was that?” (271)
Kathy admits that she had always imagined that Madame’s emotion had been caused by her role-play—the sadness of watching of a girl, sterile by genetically design, imagining herself in the role of a traditional mother, a role she could never play. However, Madame informs her of the true cause of her outburst:
“I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.” (272)
Madame echoes Benjamin by recognizing that this rise of mechanical reproduction, though of people instead of art, signals the destruction of ritual and traditionally held beliefs about what defined the human. It is telling that the song that Kathy was listening to at the time was “Never Let Me Go” by Judy Bridgewater. As Kathy reminds Madame who responds, “Yes it was that song. I’ve heard it once or twice since then. On the radio, on the television. And it’s taken me back to that little girl, dancing by herself” (271).
What Madame was mourning in her encounter with Kathy as a child was not that she could never have children. Rather, it would appear that she was mourning the loss of the “Me.” How could there be an autonomous individual “self” in a world where the component parts that defined the human, both biologically and socially were becoming interchangeable? Just as Benjamin explains the loss of the “aura” extending to all art, the loss of the human “aura” extends beyond the clones to the rest of humanity. How could there be any authenticity to an autonomous self in a world where the system of “donation” makes the demarcation between “authentic” and “artifice” impossible to locate?
By creating a world which portrays the human individual, the “ordering subject,” as a conglomerate of non-“human” objects, the organs of the clones, Ishiguro is positing an interpretation of the self that is inherently intertwined with the Other. The novel performs this interdependent relationship in the several moments where the narration switches to second person.
Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the
way I get to pick and choose who I look after. (3)
In these moments, novel operates on a metanarrative level, situating readers themselves as clones. In the switch to the second person address, the reader is at once faced with contradiction of empathizing with Kathy as “human” reader and fellow clone. We, as readers, are prompted to dissolve the binary between human and non-human by simply reading the book. If we attempt to empathize with Kathy on an anthropomorphic level, searching her confessional narrative for moments when we can identify her as a real “human,” we then find ourselves mirroring the role of guardians who likewise analyze the art of the clones for evidence of a “human soul.” This reading attempts to humanize art and reinforce the division between human and non-human that helps to enable the exploitation of the clones. However, if we interpret the novel in a way that embraces the compromised status of humanity, taking into account the reader’s status as both human and clone, we can begin to uncover an emerging interpretation of selfhood. As readers, we take Kathy’s “donation,” her confession, her inner psyche into ourselves.
If we understand the clones as reproductions, or “representations” of the human form, then we can understand the “humans” of Never Let Me Go as constituted of “representational” parts. While the donation program reflects the desire to deny human finitude, it does so at the price of destroying the notion of a concrete “humanity.” By interpreting the individual “human” as a work of representational art, or text, we can then approach the individual to a mode of textual analysis. In The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson hints at a historical materialist interpretation of the individual that embraces it’s fragmentary nature and acknowledges it’s communally interdependent status. We can begin to disentangle the interpretation of the individual human offered up by the novel from it’s own ideology and politics by examining the function of desire.
What is more damaging, from the present perspective, is that desire, like its paler and more well behaved predecessor, wish-fulfillment, remains locked into the category of the individual subject, even if the form taken by the individual in it is no longer the ego or self, but rather the individual body. We must now argue this objective more consequently, since the need to transcend individualistic categories and modes of interpretation is in many ways the fundamental issue for any doctrine of the political unconscious, of interpretation in terms of the collective or associative. (Jameson 53)
It is precisely this unrestrained impulse of wish-fulfillment or desire that is revealed in Ishiguro’s novel. In Never Let Me Go, it is the desire to consume and survive, to extend political and economic life of the libidinal body beyond biological limits that bring the cultural moment of the “donation” system to fruition. Desire, and the consumption that it inspires, work to valorize the individual subject, the “fully realized” human, in the context of the western capitalist culture in which individuality and identity is defined by what is consumed or privately owned. We can see this impulse in Kathy’s explanation of why items procured at student “Exchanges,” in which students sell arts and crafts to each other, and “Sales,” in which students can buy junk store items driven in from town, take on so much value as a method of “building up a collection of personal possessions” (Ishiguro 18). For the clones, ownership becomes a method through which to extend and confirm an individual identity. For the non-clones of Never Let Me Go, this unrestrained consumptive desire escalates to the point where humans themselves become consumable objects. However, even Kathy H. is able to point out the paradoxical nature of cobbling an identity out of foreign bodies and objects. “I can see now, too, how the Exchanges had a more subtle effect on us all. If you think about it, being dependent on each other to produce stuff that might become your private treasures—that’s bound to do things to your relationships” (16). Like Jameson, Kathy H. seems to be pointing out the necessity for restoring a social hermeneutic to the interpretation of self-hood. Regardless of the desire to affirm the self through privatization and consumption, a larger communal dependence is still inferred.
Critiquing the subject oriented archetypal system of interpretation offered by literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye, Jameson argues that Frye, who is here primarily concerned with interpretation organized around biblical text, is amiss to dissolve the category of the community—on a level of interpretation deemed the “anagogical”—into the “moral” level of interpretation which values the “libidinal body.” For Frye, at the “anagogical” level of allegorical interpretation, community and the natural world are all realigned under the sign of the individual human body. As Jameson cites from Frye:
When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human that to being inanimate. (Jameson 58)
Jameson argues that the dissolution of the social hermeneutic in Frye’s system of textual interpretation, the “recontainment” of the “struggle of the collectivity” by the image of the “Blakean absolute ‘man’” signifies a epistemic pivot, “a significant strategic and ideological move, in which political and collective imagery is transformed into a mere relay in some ultimately privatizing celebration of individual experience” (58-59). Jameson argues that the “individual,” rather than the privatized center and eventual outcome of all interpretation, is in fact a consequence or effect of a larger interconnected community.
A social hermeneutic will, on the contrary, wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of the libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community. The unity of the body must once again prefigure the renewed organic identity of associative or collective life, rather than, as for Frye, the reverse. Only the community, indeed, can dramatize that self-sufficient unity (or “structure”) of which the individual body, like the individual “subject,” is a decentered “effect,” and to which individual organisms, caught in the ceaseless chain of the generations and the species, cannot, even in the most desperate Renaissance or Neoplatonic visions of hermaphroditism (or in their contemporary counterpart, the Deleuze-Guattari “bachelor machine”), lay claim. (Jameson 74)
Embracing this dissected subjectivity of the human, it is perhaps possible to form a new interpretation of the self that is decentered and implicated within a collective network with an implicit ethical politics. By theorizing the “human” as a cultural text, subjecting it to the mode of analysis that Jameson articulates in The Political Unconscious, we can begin to take into account the material history behind its formation and begin to identify its relation to other objects and organisms. Never Let Me Go allows for an interpretation of a “human” self that is porous and reliant on foreign parts and components. It offers a “humanity” that is imbricated within a network of interdependent subjectivities, both human and non-human.
At many levels, Never Let Me Go invites readers to question their own humanity. By proposing a self-hood that is revealed to be dependent on relations with other objects, organisms, and non-humans, the novel drives readers to question the modes in which “humanity” is represented and constituted as an object of knowledge. By interrogating the political, ideological, and cultural forces at work to substantiate the human versus non-human binary in the text, I believe that we can begin to uncover a contemporary notion of identity that is both fragmentary and collective. By revealing “humanity” as an object of representation, we can interrogate the discourse and history that constitute that object and identify its relationship to others. As readers, I hope that we can use this interpretation of subjectivity to articulate a notion of self that embraces interdependencies within a socially and ecologically diverse community. I believe that these new interpretations of the self are necessary for a contemporary historical moment in which the rate and scope of individual human consumption, and the social and ecological consequences of said consumption, have never been greater.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1986. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. An Introduction. N.p.: n.p., 1990. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.
